King’s Speech

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, to his new role. I declare my interests as chair of Amey, a provider of complex facilities management services across the public estate. As chair, I visit our teams working on the estate and have recently been to Styal, a closed category prison for female adults and young offenders, as well as Leeds prison, where I benefited from spending time with the highly impressive governor, Rebecca Newby.

The challenges that the Minister faces are well known to the House—the vital importance of mental health referral support, reducing overcrowding and capital investment to make our prisons places of rehabilitation and places where people want to work are certainly high on the list. Kiosks or in-cell IT in prisons revolutionise the place, freeing up staff time, speeding up responses to queries to reduce frustration and safety concerns and creating agency among prisoners.

With overcrowding, prisons are in danger of becoming care homes for prisoners. Crowd management confines the culture of rehabilitation into the shadows, which in turn fails to reduce recidivism. Take some of the strain out of the system, as the Minister’s Statement recommends, and you can then be more impactful by creating purposeful activity. The challenge is to create career paths. The bigger challenge is scalability.

The good news is that there are few people throwing their hands in the air when the Minister openly speaks about reducing the prison population, while recognising that society needs protection. In politics, if the national mood music is in harmony with you, there is the possibility of real change and the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, is well placed to drive change management. We need more projects such as our Clean, Rehabilitative, Enabling and Decent—CRED—programme, which arms prisoners with the skills and valuable work experience they need to successfully enter the working world on release, which the Minister knows so well. Of vital importance is that prisoners work alongside our prison maintenance teams while they serve their sentence, improving their employability and well-being.

In this year alone, the CRED programme has delivered £67 million in social value, substantially impacting the lives of individuals within the justice system, and has delivered 64,000 hours of work activity each month, supporting 374 prisoners in 44 prisons. This programme has further facilitated full-time employment positions once those people have left prison, not least within Amey’s supply chain.

On a second subject, currently there are 44,000 young people in contact with the criminal justice system in the UK, with youth reoffending rates remaining high. This not only impacts the individuals but costs the taxpayer £15 billion per year. Those not in education, employment or training are five times more likely to obtain a criminal record compared with their peers. This programme helps to reduce that.

Following a meeting with His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh and his team last year, we are now working with them to develop a new programme that aims to join the dots in the current judicial system and give offenders real opportunities to transform their prospects post release. Working alongside HMPPS and prison teams, the team are co-creating a tailored programme that aligns qualifications with vocational work experience and the personal development skills passed on by the Duke of Edinburgh bronze scheme. It will create a scalable, replicable pathway to employment blueprint and develop a UK-wide rollout plan that can be offered to other industry and strategic partner organisations, delivering social value programmes in the secure estate in other sectors. The country needs more aligned supply chain partnerships and scalability is critical.

In closing, I hope that I have the agreement of your Lordships’ House to convey every possible success to Team GB as I leave for the Olympics in Paris tomorrow. I wish our athletes and the Minister and his team every success.